Many electronic devices available to a user provide geo-location and routing information. Some of these electronic devices are dedicated to provision of the geo-location and routing information. An example of such devices would be a portable GPS navigator, such as those available from TomTom Corporation of Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Another example of such devices would be a GPS navigator, built-in into a car. For example, many car manufacturers provide an option to include a built-in navigation system into their cars. Other electronic devices provide geo-location and route information as an add-on to other functions. For example, most smartphones available on the market today include an application that provides geo-location and routing services.
Some geo-location and routing services provide locations of known parking lots and garages, and/or notations for street parking having certain time-based or use-based restrictions (e.g., no standing, commercial vehicles only, from 8:00 AM to 5:00 PM). However, a driver navigating to those locations will likely find closed or occupied parking spaces, as such services fail to indicate to a driver where available parking spaces are located in reality.
Some approaches for advertising which parking spaces are becoming free involve parking lots that are outfitted with dedicated sensors to determine whether respective parking places is available or occupied. This data can be assembled in a central control device, so that the control device can control a parking guidance system in such a way that a vehicle arriving in the parking lot quickly finds a parking place. However, this approach is costly, as dedicated hardware devices must be installed in each parking lot that seeks to support the parking guidance system.
In another approach, automobiles may be outfitted with sensors that recognize when a parking place is potentially becoming free. For example, an automobile may have optical image sensor that verifies, while the automobile is driving along a row of cars, whether any cars within the row has lights on, or a thermal sensor to determine whether a car in the row of cars has a warm (running) engine or a cold engine, etc. However, this approach is limited in range, and applies only to those parking places proximate to the car (i.e., within range of the sensors), and is unable to find free parking places even one block away, let alone, in advance of reaching a future destination.
Other approaches include smartphone applications which volunteer parking spots to a central server, such as ParkMe™ or Google® Open Spot. Such approaches have required that the user leaving their parking spot to expressly report, via the smartphone application, the parking spot will be free. This requirement for an express user action increases the friction of the user experience (e.g., users may forget, or be distracted) and reduces the likelihood that a substantial number of parking places will be reported. Furthermore, such systems can suffer from inaccuracies in location data depending on the timing of the volunteer report (i.e., a user may report their location well after they have departed the actual parking spot) or stemming from GPS-based inaccuracies from signal interference. Considering that a parking spot typically has a size of 9 feet wide by 18 feet long, parking data that is off by as little as 50 feet to 100 feet could mean the other side of a two-way street, another block, or even a neighboring garage complex.